➡ Dan shares a plethora of stories about corporate promotions gone wrong, starting with Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp deal leading to financial struggles. Other examples include SanDisk’s failed ad campaign against Apple’s iPod, Lipitor’s misleading advertising featuring a non-medical doctor, Dr. Pepper’s disastrous UK promotion involving buried gold, Spirit Airlines’ inappropriate advertising following Tiger Woods’ scandal, the environmental fallout from BP Oil’s spill, and McDonald’s constant Olympic promotions miscues. He also mentions American Airlines’ overzealous lifetime flight ticket deal resulting in massive losses.
➡ The text primarily discusses various promotional marketing campaigns that have backfired, including Pepsi’s Philippines promotion in 1993, Fiat’s love letters in Spain, LifeLock’s social security display, and a disastrous disco record event at a White Sox and Detroit Tigers game in 1979. The text emphasizes the significance of smart marketing and warns against promotional strategies that may hurt a business. The end of the text promotes a health product, Ageless multicollagen, and encourages signing up for an email list.

Hey, it’s Dan. Welcome back. This is I allegedly and got a good one for you today out in Newport Beach on the pier. And it’s funny, a lot of companies are doing bad right now, and I keep getting stories sent to me, which led me down, you know, searching all these different stories about this. And we’re going to cover what they’re telling you as compared to reality. And before I get into it, please, like the video, as always, subscribe to the channel.

And today we have a sponsor ageless multicolagen. But first things first. Look at how flat these waves are. Isn’t that beautiful? It’s nice out here. Beautiful morning. Nice, warm. But Red Lobster, the seafood restaurant. Okay. They just issued their earnings and said, hey, listen, we want to attribute the fact that we’re not making any money to this one promotion that we ran. And I’m like, what are you talking about? Endless shrimp for $20.

Endless Shrimp for $20 killed our company. And I’m like, who believes this? Who believes this for a second that this is the case? Now, let’s face it, guys, red Lobster is the Denny’s of seafood. Applebee’s is a step up from this place, okay? There’s nothing about this place that is remotely high end in any way, shape, or form. If you want seafood, you don’t go to Red Lobster.

My family, being in the restaurant business, explained to me how they have all these prepared foods that are pre made. They pull them out of the freezer, they microwave stuff. Again, it is the Denny’s of seafood. Well, the CEO steps forward and says, wow, we have no idea how many people would take advantage of the $20 promotion and not buy anything else. Well, what people would do was literally walk in the restaurant, spend $20, not even buy a soda.

They would just have that and eat shrimp till it was gone. Then they had to raise the price to $22, and they said, oh, that wasn’t enough. So they went to $25. And understand, there’s not a lot of profit at $25, even for us with endless shrimp. It’s insane, guys. It’s insane. But this led me to other stories. If you really think that this company is doing bad because of one promotion, that’s ridiculous.

But during history, there have been promotions that have really backfired on companies. First one, SanDisk. SanDisk was a company that made MP3 players. Then this company named Apple came out with this thing called the ipod. And remember ipod shuffle? Ipod. We had it for all our music, and those things were great. Then they would eventually die. You had so many uses out of it, and they were just worthless, and you had all your music on them.

Well, these guys did an ad campaign where they called people you Don’t Want to Be Part of the Ichimp or the I Sheep. Get a SanDisk, and it totally backfired. By the way, where is SanDisk today. Exactly. So one of my favorite ones, know, a lot of people older have to take a statin and Lipitor did a advertising campaign where they got their brain suit out by the federal government for the simple fact that these guys went out and hired Robert Jarvik.

He invented the artificial heart, dr. Jarvik. Remember that? Jarvik Seven. Remember that. Was great. Only problem was he did ads for them where he said, listen, even doctors get high cholesterol. You need to protect yourself. He wasn’t a medical doctor, was never a doctor. So this guy’s lying to everybody, talking about how you need to take cholesterol pills, and he wasn’t even a medical doctor, never had a medical license, never did anything, was an inventor, okay? Doctor, inventor, you know what I mean? So kind of funny.

Anyways, it goes on and on. But 2007, Dr. Pepper did one promotion in the UK that was absolutely insane. They gave a wool gold coins. You could have a fortune in gold. And we buried it in this, okay? In the UK, which was a historical cemetery that was there for hundreds of years. And you had people showing up there with pickaxes that were going to find the gold, literally.

And the one thing that ended the promotion, the thing that ended it was there was a snowstorm, and the park was closed the day that this was going to be released, or they would have destroyed the cemetery that was hundreds of years old for that. So Dr. Pepper faced a little backlash and a little lawsuit city for that one. And then, oh, my gosh, spirit Airlines, which I flew, awful, awful airlines.

They had a promotion after Tiger Woods had his car accident, catch a tiger by a tail. And they thought it was funny to do that. Hey. Go to Florida. And the other thing was when Tiger Woods was having his shenanigans with his 49 girlfriends. Think there’s a 50th girlfriend out there for Tiger Woods? I’m going to venture to say that there is, okay? They have lots of problems.

They also had an advertising campaign with BP Oil where they were like, hey, get away to sunny Florida. Put some oil on your skin after the BP Oil spill, which goes to the BP oil spill. Remember BP oil? Those guys had 100,000 gallons of oil go up on beaches and birds died and killed the ecosystem, and it just destroyed the environment in that area. And then the CEO of the company is doing commercials, talking about how great the company is for the environment.

And they let those run, like during Super Bowl and things like that. It’s like, who’s thought about this? What ad agency thought about that? And then goes to the next one, which I remember this as a kid, the 1976 Olympics, okay? Remember there was a guy named Bruce Jenner. What an athlete. And who remembers that guy? It was a man’s man. Wonder whatever happened to him. That guy won the decathlon that year.

But McDonald’s did a promotion in 1976 with the Olympics that you would get to get a card if you went to McDonald’s. And if you scratch the card off and, like, let’s say it was a silver medal, well, you would win fries with a silver medal. A bronze medal would be a small drink. And a gold medal, you’d get a big Mac or a quarter Pounder with cheese.

Just a great promotion. And living near McDonald’s, we would go there literally every day and get as many of those free tickets as we could, and we ate like kings during that time. Well, 1980 Olympics. We boycotted. Didn’t happen because of Carter. And then 1984 Olympics, the Russian backed out of our Olympics. And the funny thing about this was that the 1984 Olympics was in Los Angeles. We killed it that year.

We got so many medals, and everything was just USA. USA. Because there were no Russians to compete against. McDonald’s literally had the same promotion know, get a gold medal if you wipe it off and you, you know, whatever it was swimming. And if you got a corresponding gold, silver or bronze medal, you would win food for that big Mac, quarter pounder, fries or a drink. They gave out so much food because the USA won so much stuff that they ran out of food at different locations.

It was just shut McDonald’s down. And McDonald’s said it was one of the worst promotions that they ever had. Now next one, which I love this one. American Airlines had a deal where you could fly for free for life if you paid one price and you could fly anywhere in the world. And they thought, it’s not going to be a real big deal. Who’s going to buy this? $250,000 is what they raised the price to.

Originally, Mark Cuban bought it just for the United States alone and just to continental United States. They told him it would be $135,000 for him to have that access, and he bought it. Okay? But they sold these for 250 grand. The only problem was that they had one guy. And I mean, think about the math of this. One guy took 10,000 flights that were all first class so he could fly somebody with him on first class, in first class.

And they anticipate that they lost $21 million in that promotion. Willie Mays, the baseball player, he had one of those tickets. Michael Dell, the computer company, dell Computer, he had one of those passes where you could fly wherever you wanted to. And again, they’d buy first class so they wouldn’t have to fly traditionally. And who the other one? Dennis Connor, the guy that won and lost and then won again.

The Americas Cup for us, but kind of crazy on the promotion. Let’s talk about our sponsor ageless multicolagen. You know, as you get older and your skin gets that creepy look to it. There is something that you can do about that. You can do something about your joint pain and your skin health, your hair health, your nail health, and that’s take collagen. In our 20s, we have an abundance of collagen running through our system.

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Go to Healthwithdan. com and save over 50% off the regular price. It in recent history, we have seen some of these promotions that have completely backfired on the companies, and they’ve completely lost millions of dollars with this first one, Pepsi. In 1993, they did a promotion in the Philippines where they were going to give away a million pesos. Only problem was, it was based in a three digit number, and they accidentally gave out think about this 800,000 of the winning numbers, which was 349.

So people lost their minds. Everybody thought, oh, my gosh, I’m a millionaire in the Philippines. And it created riots, and it created people freaking out over this. And Pepsi ended up giving everybody $18 for that. So lawsuits ensued, and people trampled people going to stores. It was awful. Okay, now, again, do you remember that one? Remember the Pepsi Challenge when we were in the early 80s? We have to spell out the word Pepsi Challenge, and they gave out extra game pieces for that one, too.

So Pepsi’s got a stellar reputation for doing things like this. The next one is Fiat. Fiat in Spain did something to promote their new Fiat car where they sent, think about this 20,000 letters to single women that were love letters. I saw you yesterday, and you looked fantastic, and I can’t wait to see you again. And they were anonymous letters, and they were mailed to these women, and these women started freaking out.

They were like, Wait a second. What is know? People were watching me at the bus stop. So Fiat ended up getting their brain suit out for this in Spain because of the backlash for this. So, again, little common sense. It’s one thing to have a coupon, but remember, Red Lobster is doing bad because of a $20 promotion. It’s insane. It’s insane. No one’s going out and buying things at restaurants right now.

Now the next one is one of my favorite ones ever. Okay? And this is LifeLock. Todd Davis, who ran LifeLock, that’s the security company and it’s a great company and you can protect your identity and things like that. Well, Tod Davis said, listen, our system is so secure that here’s my Social Security number. And he drove around the country, had it plastered on buses. And you think you can steal my identity? Go ahead and try.

Well, Mr. Davis within the first two months had eleven people steal his identity. Bought cell phones, took out personal loans, did a lot of things with his Social Security number and he got completely lambasted for this. Since this time it’s been a total of 13 times that his identity has been stolen. And again, think about this. The article below shows the picture of the school bus. His social is still out there.

So this idiot went out and was talking about how, hey, you just cannot get it stolen and there’s nothing you can do to hurt me. Well, people did. People took out personal loans. Man did it in Texas. All these professional identity thieves went to town against this guy. This company got fined. Think about this one, $100 million for false and misleading advertising. So bravo to them. They got theirs.

And my favorite you can’t have this video without this story is in 1979. I was in junior high and there was the disco movement with Saturday Night Fever. Kamiski park, where the White Sox play, had a double header with the Detroit Tigers, okay? And with the Detroit Tigers, the second game, a radio station WPUL, and the DJ’s names were Steve Doll and Mike Veek had a promotion where Disco sucks.

And if you want to show up to promote the disco sucks, all you have to do is spend $0. 98 for a ticket and bring a disco record that we can destroy at the game. And if you do this, you’ll get in the stadium for free. Now they underestimated the number of people that were going to promote disco sucking in Chicago and they thought they were going to get 5000 people.

They had over 50,000 people that showed up. 50,000 people. So one thing that they did, and again, I can’t show you the video of this because it’s copywritten. And I tried to, they put together in the outfield all the disco records and then blew up the disco records. And the crowd went crazy. Crowd went nuts, stormed the field, had a complete riot and completely lost it as a result of disco sucking so bad.

So isn’t that great? Now again, all the stories are listed below, all the links. But who believes in our economy that things are so bad because you do a $20 promotion for endless shrimp. Now in a perfect world, if Red Lobster was a good company. If red Lobster promoted other things and hired staff that knew how to sell, it didn’t just hire anybody that would take your order and bring it to your table.

The idea of going out and dining is, hey, how are you guys tonight? Would you like to have an appetizer and suggestive selling is what works. And if you talk to anybody who was a waitress or waiter in the last 20 years, they will tell you how they were trained to move product to get people to spend more money to be ingratiating. Would you guys like a drink first? What would you like? And it gets people to spend more money.

Red Lobster, because it’s a mill, because it’s the Denny’s of seafood, they don’t get it that people go there and don’t want to spend a dollar more than the $20. I’m going to have water now. I don’t want to pay for cheddar bay biscuits. Just bring me that. So it was an absolutely backfired. But to sit there and say that’s why the company is losing money is ridiculous.

So hope you enjoyed this. Something a little different, a little fun this morning as I walk amongst the birdies, okay? Don’t forget to hit the like button. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. Onward and upward. And plus, guys, don’t forget, if you’re on the email list, check your email. And we’ve got one going out this afternoon. And please, what else you want to get a hold of me? Hello@iallegedly.

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